content creation – Alex Furer

The ultimate device?

About a year ago I found this company out of California that was about to release what I would call the ultimate device for 3D/6D tracking. They announced back then that they will release this device for the mass market with Razer.

They showed it at CES in 2010.

Now finally it seems that the device is about to be released.

To me this device has the potential to become the ultimate device because it uses very reliable magnetic hardware for the tracking. But the most important is that they include two handheld controllers that include buttons but mostly I really like the price!!

We actually went to reputable companies in the tracking industry back in 2003 and wanted them to build exactly this device. Unfortunately we fell about 200k short to have them engineer this on our behalf 🙂

Proxy buildings using LOD’s in place

Here are some shots of the New York World’s Fair proxy simulation I built. The idea behind this was to get an estimate on how many polygons the Ogre engine can take and also it should be used as a playground to implement gameplay mechanisms.

The 3 LOD’s range from 50’000 (low level, pink) over 1.8 million (medium level, green) to 15 million polygons (highest level, turquoise). If all of either LODs is loaded at once that is.

In most cases only the very close buildings are seen in the highest level of detail.

While visually not very attractive this was a good footprint of the complete product and a great test-bed.

NYWF_Exhibit_3LOD_TetxtTags_2 — Detail Shot

NYWF_Food_3LOD_TetxtTags_2 — Detail Shot

NYWF_Pavilion_3LOD_TetxtTags_2 — Detail Shot

Ogre3D DCC Wiki

I am involved in project that is rebuilding the New York World’s Fair from 1964/65 in 3D. Read more here…

We are using the Ogre3D engine to render the ‹game›. Producing into a OpenSource engine is not always easy because sometime the tools to export models from 3D modeling applications and many other aspects of a content creation pipeline that is available through the community are outdated or simply don’t work. Ogre3D is a well spread engine by now, but most studios that work with it keep their tools and solutions close to their chest.

Wiki on Ogre3D and more…

In the spirit of the NYWF (New York World’s Fair) project which is funded by the NSF (National Science Foundation) I’m going to provide the solutions we come up on a Wiki for everyone to follow, use or even extend.